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Tuesday, October 24 2000

Beginning to Thrive

Got the contract job at the bank (signed contract and everything); pay is along the same lines of what I tended to get on the East Coast. But, while my East Coast jobs tended to be part-time temporary gigs, this will be 40 hours/week, and they say they want me for the year. So, (fortunately) more money, (unfortunately) more commitment.
Also got a place to stay for 2 months - 1-bedroom, nice size, nice view, nice location (near Fillmore + O'Farrell). More than I want to pay ($1650), but as far as I can tell, that's pretty cheap for your own 1-bedroom in San Francisco. Hopefully I'll find a cheaper spot before December 31st, when the sublet runs out.

Monday, October 23 2000

Still Alive

Friday night: set up a job interview with a bank in SFO, their Internet services division. (Contract job, not permanent job.) Spent all night packing suitcases and boxes to take with me. Got to the airport late Saturday morning, missed flight, slept at BWI for several hours, managed to get to SFO flying standby, arriving Saturday afternoon. Unpacked, slept about 12 hours. Went and met a potential roomate in the Mission; not much of a neighborhood, but just 15 minutes from BART, and roomie is into techno. Neighborhood bar has a STARZ feed so I sat around watching Rush Hour for 15 minutes munching on pizza. Now I'm going through a coupla programming books in prep for the job interview tomorrow, emailing possible housing situations from craiglist, and falling asleep. Life's still in transition.

(Worst thing about the past week: Net access through a Powerbook 1400cs over a regular modem, rather than my G3 over SDSL.)

Wednesday, October 18 2000

Sites down due to spatial difficulties

I moved out of my Silver Spring, MD apartment on Monday night; technically, I was supposed to be out by midnight, but I was there till about 7am Tuesday morning, configuring a new Unix server on a friend's network, finishing packing, and finally cleaning the place up. (Forgot to clean the bathtub. Hope I get my security deposit back anyway.) Email access was iffy for a few hours, but nothing should have bounced.

My websites were down for a while, though - maybe 36 hours? I installed the (almost-)latest versions of various software (Apache, PHP, MySQL, LinuxPPC) rather than the older versions I was running (cause that's what I tend to do when I move webservers, despite the problems it causes). Turns out an incompatibility between PHP 3.0RC and 3.0.14 (not running 4.0, because despite what they say, the incompatibilities are numerous enough to cause you big problems if you don't go through all your code) kept ahref.com working poorly for most of the day; there are differences in how the two versions deal with mixes of object-oriented and non-object-oriented code. I've got it mostly working now, enough so I can get back to packing boxes for my move, anyway.

Monday, October 16 2000

Exxon Valdez spill: Exxon still hasn't paid up

Exxon (now a part of Mobil) was ordered, in 1994, to pay $5 billion in damages to fishermen, cannery workers, property owners, etc. who lived in the areas of Alaska affected by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which took place in 1989. Exxon/Mobil continues to appeal the decision in federal court; according to a letter from several State Attorneys General, each year that they manage to delay payment, the corp earns $400 million in interest on the money they haven't had to pay yet.
MSNBC also has a story on the effects on the people of Alaska, and the general environmental effects of the spill (both from a while ago - last year?).

Sunday, October 15 2000

The Moonlit Leonids

Pointed out by a scientist friend: there might be visible meteor showers across the globe Nov. 17th and 18th. More interesting is this line: "...the 1999 outburst of 1500 meteors per hour occurred when our planet passed through a trail deposited by Tempel-Tuttle in 1899... The same model predicts that Earth is now heading for encounters with two dust streams on November 18th, 2000: one from the year 1733 and another from 1866."

Friday, October 13 2000

Michael Moore's The Awful Truth: Bush vs. Bush

Michael Moore has a cool website, and produced several of the few TV shows I never felt guilty (as in: "Why am I wasting my time?") about watching. Bravo is doing reruns of one of those shows, The Awful Truth. This week, quite apropros: Bush Bowl 2000 - in which Mike went to both Texas and Florida, to cheer on each Bush brother as they each fought to be the governor who executed more prisoners than any other in the country. (George Junior is winning, which I guess is why he's the one running for president.)

Related: Salon has an article about a Texas prisoner who confessed (years ago) to a murder for which two other men are currently serving time; the Bush office, and Texas law enforcement in general, have ignored the confession. They've also got the letter posted, in the confessed murderer's own handwriting. (Why'd he confess? He's found God. Why'd one of the two other supposedly-innocent prisoners confess initially? Evidence suggests The Man threatened him with the death penalty and physical abuse.) (Not George The Man; the generic Man.)

Corporate Image

Updated my corporate web site, in anticipation of looking for contract work on my way out to California. It's still plain in terms of design, but there's better text and seems more professional to me.

Wasn't sure whether or not to link to piou.org, as I sometimes say some weird things here. Went ahead and did so.

Million Family March

Listening to the radio this morning (6:15am, haven't been to bed). WAMU. Several times, they've referred to "the event" on Monday, in terms of the traffic it's going to cause. Do they have a policy of not mentioning the Million Family March by name? (Warning: MFM has a splash page.)

I'm still going to be in town when the MFM happens, after all. I don't know if I want to go; I don't like Farrakhan. I didn't like him either when I went to the Million Man March; but, it was a good opp to use my camera, at least.

Tuesday, October 10 2000

Saturday Night Live Star Wars casting: Walken as Han Solo, Streisand as Leia, etc.

So - after seeing Salon's Brilliant Careers piece on Christoper Walken, I went looking for video of the Saturday Night Live where Kevin Spacey plays Christopher Walken trying out to be Han Solo.

Found no video, but there's audio available. Kevin Spacey plays Christopher Walken playing Han Solo; Darrell Hammond plays Richard Dreyfus playing C3PO; Ann Gasteyer plays Barbra Streisand playing Princess Leia; and more. One of SNL's best ideas.

Monday, October 9 2000

Business 2.0

Tim Cavanaugh flames Business 2.0 for taking an article he wrote for them about Reverend Jesse Jackson, chopping it into bits, completely changing the tone and conclusions, sticking devil horns onto a picture of Jackson, and then refusing to remove his (Cavanaugh's) byline.

Business 2.0 usually does suck in terms of its articles; I guess this is why - the editorial staff apparently takes articles they don't agree with and rewrites them completely. The only good thing I've seen from them recently was Ray Kurzweil's article on the future.

Perhaps I only liked Kurzweil's article because he basically says that if we all hold on for just a few more decades, we'll have the potential to live forever:

"Oh, and one more thing: We’ll live a long time. The expanding human life span is another one of those exponential trends. In the 18th century, we added a few days every year to human longevity; in the 19th we added a couple of weeks each year; and now we’re adding almost a half a year every year. With the revolutions in rational drug design, genomics, therapeutic cloning of our own organs and tissues, and related developments in bio-information sciences, we will add more than a year every year within 10 years. So take care of yourself the old-fashioned way for just a little while longer, and you may actually get to experience the remarkable century ahead."

Ig Nobel Winners

The Year 2000 Ig Nobel winners have been announced. This year's prize winners range from psychologists who investigated how not realizing you're a loser makes you feel more capable; a writer who wants the world to move to a "no-food" diet; frog levitators; and the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, for revolutionizing the mass-wedding industry.

(After 60 seconds, looks like the webcast/video is well worth watching.)

Moby

New York Times wonders why techno god Moby is crossing over so well with his album Play.

Mr. Cheney, the government had everything to do with your financial success

Dick Cheney, in the vice-presidential debates, in response to a comment on his personal wealth/how much better he's done over the past 8 years: "And most of it, and I can tell you, Joe, that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Online opinion mag Tom Paine points out that actually, the oil company at which Cheney made so much money got a lot of money from government contracts; and that when Cheney joined them, their government contracts doubled to $2.3 billion over 5 years, at the same time as their contributions to politicians increased significantly.

Sunday, October 8 2000

CNN Columnist on the LAPD scandals

Edward Lazarus: "We still don't know how many innocent people were jailed (and perhaps remain in jail) because of the treachery of L.A. cops. We still don't know how many guilty persons will now go free because skeptical juries no longer trust the testimony of police officers."

Friday, October 6 2000

Super-portable computer system

Part 1: Inviso's eShades - glasses that mimic a 19-inch monitor at 2.5 feet, 800x600 resolution.
Part 2: I Buy Power's Pocket EPC System - very small 600 Mhz Pentium 3.
Part 3: VTI's CyberGlove - can be programmed to read your finger movements as taps on a keyboard.

Privacy vs. education

Password-protected CHE article: Texas and California say they guarantee state college admission to the top X% of graduating high school seniors in their respective states; but, due to federal privacy laws, the states say they can't let the colleges know who those top students are. So the colleges have to go do research themselves, which ends up costing money and missing students...

Thursday, October 5 2000

Comix and Bush

The Boondocks on Bush's ability to lead.

Tom the Dancing Bug on the Republican October surprise. (Hint: Cheney's out, Powell's in.)

Wednesday, October 4 2000

Isn't that cute?

Sixth grader Alex Weisler starts a web portal (of sorts) for kids' books.

Book review on ahref.com for Programming Perl

I've written a book review of Programming Perl, 3rd edition, over at ahref.com.

I find it impossible to read such books (programming reference books) straight through if I already know the language. So instead of reading the whole thing, I kept it on my desk for a few months, and cracked it open to the appropriate chapter whenever I needed to know something about Perl. And that's how I figured out that it would be useful to people like me (people who already know the language). I take it as a given that it will be good for Perl newbies; both the previous editions were, and I looked enough at the first chapter and the examples in other chapters that the prose is still as - entertaining and enlightening? - as before.

Also at ahref.com (should I just be calling it ahref?), I've revamped the Web Index; instead of using strange variable-based URLs, the URLs make sense (/index/design/layout/ instead of something like /index/catlistings.html?cat_id=35). The pages are static, so I've made 'em accessible to web 'bots; my hits have gone up a bit as a result - not just from the bots, but from people who can find the pages through search engines now.

Next I've got to decide if I want to just use htdig for searching the Web Index, or improve on my own MySQL-based search system; and how to personalize the mailings of new articles/sites.

Interracial marriage

AP story at Salon says section 102 of the Alabama constitution still bans interracial marriage; a ballot proposal this November aims to excise said section. (Note: interracial marriages still do happen there, as that section is unenforceable as the result of a Supreme Court ruling.)

A memory: I'm sitting at a cafeteria table with 2 white guys (D and P) and an Asian-American gal (whose first initial I've forgotten, but let's call her S) in college. D is hitting on S; and tells her it's people's duty to have children with people of other races, in order to reduce racism in the world (or our country, anyway). P says that that's ridiculous; all that race-mixing will do is create a whole bunch of different races for people to be prejudiced against. It apparently didn't enter his mind that someone with Af, Eu, and As ancestors would probably find it harder to be prejudiced against people with any of the three backgrounds. That as mixed-race numbers grew, the prejudices (or lack thereof) of mixed-race people would be the ones that start mattering more...

Tuesday, October 3 2000

Prague Protests: Industry Standard Gets It Wrong

The Industry Standard on the protests in Prague, which shut down the IMF and World Bank meetings early:

"Speedy electronic communication has enabled the anti-capitalist protests to become more and more sophisticated. The worldwide movement against globalisation, an unintended oxymoronic body of protest, is growing into a force to be reckoned with."

Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, who could almost call themselves inventors of the Internet, give Al Gore props

Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf, generally recognized as two of the greatest technical contributors to the creation of the Internet, say (1) Al Gore never said he invented the Internet, and (2) Al Gore has done more on the political and funding side to foster the growth of the Internet than anyone else. Their letter seems to have first appeared at politechbot, Declan McCullagh's site about politics and the Internet. Worth noting: McCullagh is the Wired reporter who first said that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. Worth noting is the RRE message in which Phil Agre takes McCullagh to task for his sloppy reporting.

(note: entry updated 10/5; title changed)

Monday, October 2 2000

Arianna Huffington Continues to Morph...

I first became "aware" of Arianna Huffington back in 1995, when she climbed into bed with Al Franken (and eventually into a menage-a-trois with him and Barney Frank) on Politically Incorrect to discuss politics. She was an unapologetic Republican pundit at the time, after having financed her husband's attempt to join the U.S. Congress, essentially trying to buy an election. (Usually, big money wins elections; her husband, despite huge spending, lost.) (They've since divorced.)

Since then, she seems to have morphed. She's become somewhat of a populist; I would guess her former Republican/conservative comrades liked it at first, because she skewered both left and right (mostly left) for failing to service the disenfranchised of the U.S. But now, in her latest opinion column for Salon.com, she advocates for two race-oriented issues, one which clearly helps Democrats, another which she (and probably others) perceives as doing so.

Issue 1: the drug war, and drug sentencing disparities. Those sentenced for possession of crack (mostly blacks) are sent to jail using much harsher mandatory minimum sentences than those sentenced for possession of powder cocaine (mostly whites). Now, Congress has increased mandatory minimums for possession of methamphetamines except for "club drugs" like ecstasy.

"Could it be because meth, like crack, is associated primarily with minority users, while 'X' is favored by middle- and upper-class white kids? Or should we be on the lookout for a spike in all-night raves up on the Hill?"

"Florida's history of racial discrimination figures prominently in the plaintiffs' legal arguments. The State's voting ban on ex-felons, adopted three years after the Civil War, was one of many Reconstruction-era tactics designed to undermine the political power of ex-slaves. The lawsuit argues that, because of its discriminatory intent and effect, Florida's voting ban violates the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

High Holidays

(I'd always thought it was "High Holy Days." Is it?) For those of us who don't know enough about our Jewish friends' religion, about.com has a list of Jewish holidays and information about them (the holidays, that is; not your friends).

What's a Felony?

From a Nolo Press page on crimes: "If a law provides for imprisonment for longer than a year, the crime is usually considered a felony."

From the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, stats on felonies in 1996: 136,016 people were convicted of felonies for drug possession; 229,803 convicted of felonies for drug trafficking; 17,921 convicted of felonies for motor vehicle theft; 11,766 for murder.

About this site

This is the personal web site for Edward (Ed) Piou. Consisting mainly of a blog (operational since 1999) and various photos.

Some online projects I'm working on

Politics

Charity, Non-profits...

A while ago, I decided to put my money where my mind is on a (roughly) monthly basis and give to:

Photos

Public events documented through pictures...